Forgot Your Password?

New to The Nation? Subscribe

Print subscriber? Activate your online access

.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}

Our Endorsement: Brad Lander for Congress

The Nation backs the NY-10 candidate who has the experience, financial expertise, and progressive vision to be an essential leader in the House.

Our Endorsement: Brad Lander for Congress

The Nation backs the NY-10 candidate who has the experience, financial expertise, and progressive vision to be an essential leader in the House.

Brad Lander is not just an able candidate for the US House of Representatives. He is a necessary candidate. It is for this reason that The Nation enthusiastically endorses Lander’s candidacy in the June 23 Democratic primary for New York City’s 10th Congressional District.

There is a good chance that Democrats will retake the House in November. If they do, they will immediately be faced with the two-fold challenge of checking and balancing Donald Trump’s chaos while presenting a bold vision for how the United States must address critical economic, social justice, environmental, and foreign policy issues.

To a dramatically greater extent than the Democrat he is taking on in the primary, two-term incumbent Dan Goldman, Lander is up to the challenge.

Goldman represents the business-as-usual wing of a Democratic Party that has missed too many opportunities because of its refusal to break from a centrist status quo that is timid and timorous.

Lander is the opposite. He knows that this is a time for Democrats to nominate and elect fierce progressive champions who are willing to drain the swamp in Washington, and to upend the pervasive pay-to-play corruption that is turning billionaires into trillionaires while working people struggle to get by.

Lander’s vision is rooted in the deep experience that makes him the sort of transformative leader that Congress desperately needs in this 250th year of the American experiment.

From his earliest days as the leader of the Fifth Avenue Committee, a community-based affordable housing organization, Lander has been a prescient and dedicated progressive warrior. He was focused on “affordability” before it became a political buzzword. As a multi-term city councilman and later as city comptroller, he embraced and advanced efforts to pass paid sick leave (over the veto of Mayor Michael Bloomberg), divest from fossil fuels, protect tenants from eviction, require stable schedules workers, and provide living wages and protections against wage theft for contingent workers.

The list goes on and on, because for decades Lander has been a legislative and executive leader who has proven that it is possible to build progressive power—precisely the experience that will be necessary if Democrats take the House with a narrow majority or, perish the thought, they remain in the minority on Capitol Hill.

Like other progressives who have come to Washington with significant governing experience—such as Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Mark Pocan (D-WI), Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA)—Lander recognizes the importance of........

© The Nation